The present invention generally relates to communications systems and, more particularly, to wireless systems, e.g., terrestrial broadcast, cellular, Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi), satellite, etc.
In many wireless communications systems, the key problem is that a receiver may be able to receive the transmission of some of the channels (or signals) but not all of them. For example, in a terrestrial broadcast television (TV) system in the United States, a city may typically have 5 to 15 terrestrial transmitters that are geographically separated, each terrestrial transmitter broadcasting content on a particular channel (or channels). However, a TV set may only be able to receive a subset of the channels being broadcast in a given geographical area because of the geographical location of the TV set. Indeed, for a modern digital communication system like the ATSC-DTV (Advanced Television Systems Committee-Digital Television) system (e.g., see, United States Advanced Television Systems Committee, “ATSC Digital Television Standard”, Document A/53, Sep. 16, 1995 and “Guide to the Use of the ATSC Digital Television Standard”, Document A/54, Oct. 4, 1995), it is well known that the coverage for a given area varies depending on the location of the TV set. This is further illustrated in FIG. 1. A geographical area includes terrestrial ATSC-DTV transmission towers T1, T2, T3 and T4, for broadcasting content associated with channels 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. (For the purposes of this example, it is assumed that each transmission tower only broadcasts programming for a single channel.) In this geographical area, two TV sets, TV set 10 and TV set 20, are located. As illustrated in FIG. 1 by the dotted lines arrows, TV set 10 is only able to receive a subset of the available channels, i.e., channels 2, 3 and 4. Likewise, the dashed line arrows of FIG. 1 illustrate that TV set 20 is only able to receive channels 1, 2 and 4.
There is no solution today that can mitigate this problem.